'Antichamber' an exercise in endurance

Antichamber

PCAlexander BruceRating: N/A

3.0 stars

Compared to literature, film and TV, video games are a relatively young medium of entertainment. And like a lot of young things, they can be kind of dumb at times.

Antichamber is not a dumb game. In fact, Antichamber is a game about how we play games. It’s very meta, and not in the condescending way we sometimes use that word. Rather, it’s an earnest examination of game design, of the language of video games and of how we’ve learned to interact with 3D virtual worlds. For that alone, it’s commendable.

Whether Antichamber is actually much fun to play is open to debate.

Six years in the making (by one very patient man) and currently a darling of the indie game scene, Antichamber is of the absurdly specific “first-person puzzle-platformer” sub-genre. If you’ve played Portal, you know what this is about: moving around maze-like, meticulously designed 3D environments, figuring out how to get from A to B.

But Antichamber is not really like Portal. From its unusual format to its sparse visuals to its deliberately confounding structure, it’s like one of those tiny puzzle sculptures that seem impossible to disentangle until you look at it a new way and think way outside of the box.

The game begins in a large room that serves as Antichamber’s hub. From here, you can immediately teleport to any point in the game’s labyrinth that you’ve previously visited, and you can also pop back to the hub at will. A 90-minute countdown clock adds time pressure (though you surely won’t reach the game’s end on your first – or likely fifth – attempt), and one wall is decorated with all of the tips and hints uncovered during your explorations, many of which double as general life lessons.

The maze itself is like an M. C. Escher painting come to life, and that’s what makes Antichamber so interesting. It plays with our expectations through optical illusions, with walls that shift and dematerialize and behaviour that defies what we’ve come to expect from first-person games.

The game’s world follows a certain logical consistency, with rules slowly revealed over time and several “eureka!” moments to be had, particularly if you pay attention to the chalkboard clues scattered throughout. There’s no penalty for trying to come at a problem from a weird angle – sometimes literally – and this kind of experimentation often yields the best results.

The problem I had with Antichamber was that the lack of any sort of context to my actions sapped my motivation to keep forging ahead. I like brain-teasing puzzles, but one after another after another, with no hint of a greater reward beyond, made this feel more like an exercise in endurance. Maybe that’s Antichamber’s exact intent, and I’ve played right into it. But that still doesn’t mean it’s, you know, a whole ton of fun.

As an experimental bit of game design full of intriguing puzzles that defy earthly geometry, Antichamber is a success. Yet given a choice, I’d much rather spend my time with a more conventional first-person puzzler like Portal 2, Quantum Conundrum or Q.U.B.E. Maybe Antichamber is a little too clever for its own good. Or maybe I’m just dumb.

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'Antichamber' an exercise in endurance

Compared to literature, film and TV, video games are a relatively young medium of entertainment. And like a lot of young things, they can be kind of dumb at times.

Antichamber is not a dumb game. In fact, Antichamber is a game about how we play games. It’s very meta, and not in the condescending way we sometimes use that word. Rather, it’s an earnest examination of game design, of the language of video games and of how we’ve learned to interact with 3D virtual worlds. For that alone, it’s commendable.